Entries categorized "Education"

At least 17 Arizona state legislators attended a lavish recruitment dinner on Tuesday for the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), an out-of-state right-wing corporate bill mill that wields a heavy influence in Arizona and at state capitols around the country. [Hat tip to Progress Now for the info.]

The senators and representatives, including Senate President Andy Biggs, enjoyed dinner and drinks alongside several prominent lobbyists in a private back room at Donovan’s, one of the Valley’s finest steak and chop houses. They came at the behest of Rep. Debbie Lesko, ALEC’s Arizona Chairwoman, whose leaked invitation billed the event as “an Arizona ALEC Membership Reception/Dinner” while including her House office number for RSVPs. It is unclear how many Arizona legislators Lesko invited to Tuesday’s shin-dig, but no Democrats were seen arriving.

In addition to Sen. Biggs and Rep. Lesko, lawmakers spotted at the dinner included: Reps. Eddie Farnsworth, John Kavanagh, Carl Seel, Brenda Barton, Bob Thorpe, David Livingston, J.D. Mesnard, Justin Olson, Michelle Ugenti, T.J. Shope, Adam Kwasman, Jeff Dial; and Senators Nancy Barto, Chester Crandell and Don Shooter. [You'll remember that Farnsworth and Kavanagh were big stars on Thursday-- valiantly defending the anti-gay bill SB1062-- when the Arizona House passed it. You'll also remember that Farnsworth, Olson, Ugenti, Lesko, and Seel were on the committees that forced the death of the Equal Rights Amendment by not hearing it. So, who are they supposed to be working for?]

Informal conversation starts at 6:00. Video starts at 7:00, followed by discussion until whenever. (Note: We could not get a suitable license to show the Robert Reich video, so we're doing this instead.)

There is actually a pretty vigorous debate over Common Core Standards and many legitimate questions over to what extent, or even if, they should be implemented. It is a debate that needs to happen, and one that should be conducted with rigor, integrity, and an eye toward our future needs as a community, state, and nation.

Of course, this is not the sort of debate that is happening in the Arizona Legislature, thanks largely to Senator Al Melvin (R-Segregated Gated Retirement Community North of Town). Melvin's SB 1310, which passed a Senate Committee yesterday, bans the implementation of Common Core in Arizona. The Senator's stated reason for his opposition cited no specifics, merely that the standards were a good idea from "the private sector and the governors" that got "hijacked by Washington." In other words, the merits of the standards are less of an issue than the fact that they are being championed by The Big Bad Black Man.

In a comment to another news story about Huppenthal and his private school marketing scheme, Diana Murray, a Paradise Valley School District parent, says that just this evening, she received the robocall from the Arizona Superintendent of PUBLIC Schools directing her to the Goldwater Institute's website for more information about taxpayer funding for private schools.

Additionally, the legislature is currently poised to expand the availability of taxpayer funds for private schools, with SB1236 and HB2291. In his video interview with Brahm Resnik last week (at the 7 minute mark of the 13 minute interview), Huppenthal acknowledged that if those bills are enacted, 50 to 65 percent of Arizona students would be eligible for taxpayer money to send them to private (NOT charter, but PRIVATE) schools.

Therefore, if you think this is the right thing to do, I have this message for you, John.

This is a clear violation of the Arizona Constitution which prohibits state funding to private and parochial schools:

Article 2, Section 12: "No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment."

Article 11, Section 7: "No sectarian instruction shall be imparted in any school or state educational institution that may be established under this Constitution, and no religious or political test or qualification shall ever be required as a condition of admission into any public educational institution of the state, as teacher, student, or pupil;"

Several years ago, the Goldwater institute convinced the Arizona Supreme Court to accept a sort of "straw man exchange" argument common in real estate transactions to uphold tax credits that supported private and parochial schools. The argument was that the money went to the parents, not directly from the state to the schools, and thus did not violate the constitutional provisions above. The legal fiction created by the Court was in error, but established a legal precedent that the Goldwater Institute has been trying to exploit ever since.

And this is exactly what our Tea-Publican controlled legislature is hoping to accomplish with these so-called "empowerment scholarship accounts." Howard Fischer reports:

A House panel agreed Monday to allow hundreds of thousands of children to attend private and parochial schools at public expense — a vote one legislator said is part of a radical agenda to destroy public schools.

Grassroots volunteers mingled with local and statewide Democratic Party glitterati at the official campaign kick-off event for Dr. Randall Friese, who is running for a seat in Arizona House of Representatives.

Friese recently announced his candidacy for one of LD9's two seats in the Arizona House. Currently, LD9, which stretches from Speedway in midtown north into the Foothills, is a competitive district being served by Republican Ethan Orr and Democrat Victoria Steele in the House and Democrat Steve Farley in the Arizona Senate.

Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and her astronaut husband Mark Kelly hosted an estimated 130 stalwarts of the Pima County Democratic Party, including current County Chair Don Jorgenson, past Chair Jeff Rogers, and several current and former elected Democrats: LD9 Rep. Victoria Steele, LD10 Reps. Stephanie Mach and Bruce Wheeler, LD10 Senator Dave Bradley, Tucson City Councilwoman Karin Uhlich, former Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, former Attorney General and current Secretary of State candidate Terry Goddard, and former Rep. Nancy Young-Wright. (Farley was conspicuously absent, following a social media dust-up on Friday over this article in the Arizona Daily Star.)

Former Giffords' staffer Pam Simon and Kelly gave impassioned speeches about Friese, who was one of the University Medical Center trauma surgeons who cared for Giffords and others who were shot on January 8, 2011. During Giffords' long stay in UMC's intensive care unit (ICU), Kelly and Friese became friends and had many late-night ICU discussions on multiple topics-- including politics. According to Kelly, Friese and Giffords are similar in that they are dedicated to finding solutions, not playing politics. [Friese vs Orr on the issues, after the jump.]

There was a lot of hand-wringing among progressives/secular types before, during, and after “Science Guy” Bill Nye’s debate with Creation Museum founder Ken Ham on Tuesday night, which was held at the aforementioned “museum” in Kentucky. There is certainly a good argument for avoiding such debates entirely, as Richard Dawkins does. Eschewing them is probably a wise general rule for proponents of evolution since the debate format gives undeserved credibility to evidence-free assertions like Creationism. Also, debates are too often focused on performance over substance and “winners” and “losers”. For example, Mitt Romney “won” his first Presidential debate by boldly lying about his positions and catching President Obama off-guard. But, having watched it, I’m glad that Nye took the risk with this particular debate.

As Craig McDermott posted yesterday, the Senate Government and Environment Committee has on its agenda today SB1094, attacking teachers unions by outlawing third-party payroll deductions for school district employees unless those deductions are each authorized annually.

Progress Now requests your action on this bill:

There is an important hearing on an ALEC today at the Arizona State Senate. The Senate Government and Environment Committee will hear Senate Bill 1094 (school employees; paycheck deductions; authorization) at 2 p.m. today in Senate Hearing Room 3. This "paycheck deception" legislation, which would makes it harder for members of labor organizations to express their free speech rights, has been ALEC model legislation since 1998. You can watch the hearing online here.

The Arizona Daily Star's David Fitzsimmons nails it with a parody of Pink Floyd's The Wall. This would be a good project for an aspiring video producer/director to make a music video of this. If you do, please send us a link.

I am not going to pretend that I know exactly what programs Kavanagh may or may not have benefited from during what must have been a remarkable academic career. Though I served with him for two years, I really know little about his story. Suffice it to say, I made many Republican friends while I was at the capitol and he was not one of them.

However, during my college career, I knew many people from backgrounds very similar to Kavanagh's. Most of them were helped directly by financial aid in one way or another. More importantly they were helped by the fact that the college experience is very different than it was in previous decades because legislation like the GI Bill (the brainchild of Arizona's own Senator Ernest "Mac" McFarland) and the Higher Education Act of 1965 made college accessible to more people. As a result, colleges have been forced over the years to accommodate so-called "non-traditional students," including working people, older students and students with families by altering their schedules, loosening stuffy traditions, and providing services on campus for a population with different and diverse needs. The once-elite experience of college has been democratized, and financial aid has been a big part of this.

Senate Democrats have decided to do something about the self-dealing by state legislators to line their own pockets, filing SB 1068 (.pdf), a bill which should go by the popular name of The Steve Yarbrough Disclosure Act.

[T]he bills are pouring in already, 50 introduced in the House, 76 in the Senate at the time of this writing.

And two are colliding with each other already.

One is SB 1068, sponsored by a bunch of Democratic senators, including Tempe’s Ed Ableser. Here’s what it calls for:

A legislator who casts a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives or the Senate with respect to any bill, memorial or resolution in which the legislator has a direct financial interest shall prepare a written statement that identifies the bill, memorial or resolution, the legislator’s vote and the nature of the legislator’s direct financial interest. The legislator shall file the statement with the Chief Clerk of the House of Representatives or the Secretary of the Senate. The statement shall be posted on the internet web page corresponding to the legislator as found on the legislature’s website. The Web page for each legislator shall have an area entitled 'Disclosure of Direct Financial Interest' for each statement to be posted.

In other words, if my representative floats a bill and will have a direct financial benefit from that bill’s passage, he must file a statement explaining how it benefits him.

As I count down to my exit from BfA and entrance onto The Range, I'm taking a look back on my tenure here. Mike Bryan says I've written over 3,000 posts, and I believe it. Even scrolling through them at lightning speed takes some time. Here's a continuation of my first self-indulgent trip down memory lane, stopping just before the horrific January 8, 2011, shooting.

• I started blogging about charter schools in earnest in 2009, looking at the Imagine School chain, which has gone from bad to even further downhill, BASIS, which does a good job at what it does but lies through its teeth about how it does it, and other charters.

• I went after candidate Steve Kozachik in a post in 2009 when he ran for city council for the first time. Boy, was I wrong. Sorry about that, Steve.

• I began my series about the "Creative Headline Writing Team" at the Star in 2010 when it was coming up with jaw-droppingly misleading and/or politically slanted headlines. I capped the series with a "Worst Star Headline of the Year" contest in December. Probably coincidentally, the paper's headlines have gotten better since then.

• The Goldwater Institute's education guy, Matthew Ladner, was pushing the "Florida education miracle" pretty heavy. I wrote a series of posts, "The Floridation of Arizona Education" in 2010, taking apart the not-so-miraculous educational progress in the Sunshine State. Since then, Arizona has adopted a number of Florida education ideas, while Florida has backpedaled on some of them. Ladner now works for Florida ex-Guv Jeb Bush.

The Arizona Chamber of Commerce announced its 2014 legislative agenda. Along the way, Speaker of the House Andy Tobin, who's running for Congress in CD-1, said Washington is what's wrong with Arizona.

“If the federal government took its foot off the throat of Arizona, we would be doing a lot better,” he said.

The ed news is, the Chamber wants to promote a world-class education system. So far so good. It wants to do it by adding more educational choice -- not so good. That's code-speak for more vouchers, more money and latitude for charters and a continuing shrinking of funds for our school district schools. If there's any question about the direction this is heading:

Toward that end, the Arizona Chamber announced nationally recognized education leader Lisa Graham Keegan, a past Arizona superintendent of public instruction, will lead an effort to bring about major reforms to Arizona’s education system.

Keegan brought us charter schools when she was in the state senate, made sure they were under-regulated when she was Arizona's Ed Supe, was McCain's education advisor when he ran for president, and currently works fist in glove with Craig Barrett, the multi-millionaire ex-CEO of Intel who is Brewer's point man for the state's conservative "education reform" agenda and has said he wants to make sure we don't "throw money" at education.

My new home on The Range is official. While New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie is clinging to his last shred of plausible deniability, Weekly editor Dan Gibson lost his when he committed to my new position in print. He went so far as to say my presence on the blog "should class up the joint a bit." Stay classy, The Range!

I've been looking through my old BfA posts and found (a) there are a lot of them and (b) a few of them are worth remembering. So, without anyone requesting it, I'm taking a trip down memory lane. This one stops in July, 2009. If I don't get bored, I'll keep plowing up through to the present.

• I met Mike Bryan, who started BfA, when he and I co-blogged an election integrity trial in late 2007. At lunch one day, I told him I'd like to write regularly on the blog, mainly about education. He quizzed me, probably to see if I had anything to say, then handed me the keys to the kingdom. I wrote my first post under my byline in February, 2008. Since then, the blog has grown to include multiple contributers from the Tucson and Phoenix areas.

• McCain declared his rustic pleasure palace in the Sedona area was a "ranch" in 2008. Dr. Word (a character I created for that post) was furious, saying that a ranch had sheep and cows and animals like that, and McCain's spread was all opulence, no cattle. A few others made the same observation independently of mine, but the Guardian in the U.K. actually referenced my post directly. I decided to look through the web to see if there was a real McCain Ranch and discovered there once was an appropriately fictional McCain Ranch, owned by The Rifleman on the old TV series. I uncovered a bunch of black and white stills from the show, put McCain's head on Chuck Connors' shoulders and captioned them.

Somebody at the Star made a great catch. They spotted this license in Tucson sometime last week. Someone bought the new Extraordinary Educators license plate from the state that has "ARIZONA" at the top and "Support our Schools" at the bottom and put an all-too-appropriate message in between.

Ann-Eve Pedersen sent me the pic and suggested, since the two of us are taping our cable access show, Education: The Rest of the Story, Friday afternoon, it would be fun to have people help us come up with some other messages for the license plate. We'll use the best ones on a segment of the show. My first thought is, "PLEASE, GOV," (Support Our Schools). I'm sure you can do better.

Remember, the clock is ticking. Deadline Friday morning.

Here's the template license, for reference.

EARLY ENTRIES NOTE: Cheri has chimed in with 5 entries here, including Arizona [Y CANT YOU] [B WILNG2] and [SLOW2] Support Our Schools. On Facebook, we have dozens. REFUZS2, OUGHTA, SUKSAT, DEMANDSU, EVERY1, 4KIDS, and on and on. C'mon, join the fun! The contest ends Friday morning, because Ann-Eve Pedersen and I will be announcing the winners at our taping of "Arizona: The Rest of the Story" Friday afternoon.

This is simply chilling. A teacher who spent a year teaching in one of K12 Inc.'s online charter school tells all in an Edweek blog post, 15 Months in Virtual Charter Hell: A Teacher's Tale. Since Education Week is subscription only, I don't know if non-subscribers can read it (Will someone tell me in the comments please?), so I'll give you a taste of the bitter gall in the story.

Darcy Bedortha is a teacher who decided to give online education a try at one of the K12 Inc. schools (she doesn't say which one). "I became a teacher because I am an advocate for youth and social justice," she writes, but she soon found that wasn't her role. It was to manage and unmanageable number of online students, keep them from leaving and recruit new students.

Darcy taught high school English. One day a week, she had "blackboard sessions" with her classes. About 10% of the students logged on. Students enrolled and dropped out regularly, meaning they were working on a whole assortment of projects and assignments she had to oversee -- 30 separate courses at one point.

My first month of teaching exhausted me, and there was never a moment in 15 months to catch my breath (many of us taught summer school, with no extra compensation, per employment agreement). Teachers are responsible for setting up courses, due dates, course pathways, etc. in connection to an extensive and ever-changing digital curriculum which is fraught with technical glitches and system-level errors. Teachers are also required to be available to students during the day, late into the evening and on weekends. In addition, they must contribute to "special projects".

At one point, when a colleague took an unexpected leave, Darcy had a 476 student classload. A normal classload was 300 students or more.

David Safier has posted about the plans of the "Kochtopus" Death Star, the Goldwater Institute, to "voucherize", i.e., privatize education in Arizona for profit. "Vouchers on steroids" for all!.

This is a clear violation of the Arizona Constitution which prohibits state funding to private and parochial schools:

Article 2, Section 12: "No public money or property shall be appropriated for or applied to any religious worship, exercise, or instruction, or to the support of any religious establishment."

Article 11, Section 7: "No sectarian instruction shall be imparted in any school or state educational institution that may be established under this Constitution, and no religious or political test or qualification shall ever be required as a condition of admission into any public educational institution of the state, as teacher, student, or pupil;"

Several years ago, the Goldwater institute convinced the Arizona Supreme Court to accept a sort of "straw man exchange" argument common in real estate transactions to uphold tax credits that supported private and parochial schools. The argument was that the money went to the parents, not directly from the state to the schools, and thus did not violate the constitutional provisions above. The legal fiction created by the Court was in error, but established a legal precedent that the Goldwater Institute has been trying to exploit ever since.

If successful, the "Kochtopus" Death Star could nullify the above constitutional provisions without ever submitting a repeal to the voters by employing the legal fiction previously accepted by the Court. That would mean the death of public education in Arizona at the hands of Republicans who want to privatize education for profit.

Republicans love widows and orphans funds. What better way to pass conservative legislation than to have it serve the least fortunate? "How dare you oppose services for those poor, neglected [fill in the blank]!" Then, once the legislation is passed and the elephant's trunk has slipped under the tent flap, the rest of the pachyderm's body inches inside the tent, expanding the legislation to serve the people they really care about. Hint: it's not the widows and orphans they really care about.

Our Republican lege passed the Goldwater Institute-created Education Empowerment Accounts (also called Education Savings Accounts) in 2011. If you want a play-by-play accounting of the bill, you can read my 2011 post about it. The basic idea is, the state sets up voucher-like accounts for children which their parents can spend for a variety of educational purposes -- private school, tutoring, educational materials and so on. What they don't spend one year rolls over to the next. Anything left unspent when the child graduates can be used for college tuition. It's the first of its kind in the country and possibly the most dangerous form of school voucher legislation I've seen.

Originally the bill was limited to students with learning disabilities and foster children. Then it was expanded to include children attending schools with state grades of D or F. In this next legislative session, Rep. Debbie Lesko, holding hands with G.I.'s ed guy, Jonathan Butcher, will push a bill to make the vouchers available to every child in Arizona. (FYI: Butcher is also co-chair of ALEC's Education Task Force.)

I'm learning that Ed Supe John Huppenthal is either a true geek or a geek-wannabe. He loves plowing through data and studies. His pride and joy is an educational computer-based math game he created, FreeThrow, which he's been trying to get schools across the state to use and hopes to sell nationally. I know Sunnyside District uses it to some extent (though I can't say whether it's because of the game's effectiveness or as a way for Isquierdo to curry favor with Hupp), but I haven't seen anything recent about other districts using it.

And Hupp's a crazy promoter of improving the Ed Department's data system. He's once again begging the lege to send him $16.5 million to upgrade the system. He'd actually like more than $50 million, but he's trying to lower his expectations.

Maybe the money is needed. Maybe the schools and staff would benefit from a computer system that functions better. But when will he become an equally enthusiastic promoter for increased education funding? Here's the closest Hupp has come to advocating for more money for schools.

"Our school system needs to be compensated at least for inflation," he said. "And they need a little bit of catch-up ground from the cuts over the last couple of years."

That's a pretty weak sermon coming from the Ed Supe's bully pulpit. It's nothing close to his continual drumbeat for (Oh boy! Computers!) money to upgrade his data system.

Soon, probably next week, I'll be moving from Blog for Arizona to Tucson Weekly's blog, The Range. I love this blog, but I was given the opportunity to be part of the Weekly and I took it. The paper's editor, Dan Gibson, and I sat down and talked. He says he wants me to do what I'm doing here, just do it over there. He gave me no direction, which is fine by me. I imagine I'll make a few adjustments. I have to introduce myself to a new readership, and I expect many of them are younger than the BfA readers (and way younger than me). A large number of readers, I'm sure, have school-aged children or will in a few years, and those people will be thinking about education from a personal viewpoint. And while everyone who reads BfA is a political junkie at one level or another, many Range readers go there for the music, entertainment and food stories as well as video links to the absurd. It'll be an interesting challenge for me to try and get their attention.

It's quite a change of virtual venue. This is a pretty serious bunch of bloggers here at BfA, and with occasional exceptions, the posts are thoughtful and meaningful. A recent Range post, on the other extreme, had the headline, "So, There's This Guy with Two Penises." And it's by Mari Herreras, a terrific journalist whose articles always leave me more informed, even those about education where I try to keep up on what's happening. Mari does write serious posts as well, of course, as does Jim Nintzel, but when I link to The Range, I'm usually looking to find out about what folks younger than me are doing and thinking. So my posts will be a deviation from the norm.

I'm hoping loyal readers will develop a split allegiance. I'm certainly going to be reading BfA on a regular basis, and I expect you will too. There's no better place to get a sense of what progressives are thinking and what they're doing in Arizona and around the country. But come visit me over at The Range as well, and add to whatever comment stream my posts generate. If you want to make sure you never have to read about "This Guy with Two Penises," you can create a bookmark that will go directly to a list of my posts. You'll also be able to contact me via a yet-to-be-created email address at The Weekly.

NOTE TO DAN GIBSON: If my cheesy "Home on The Range" headline is a deal breaker, let me know. Once I got it in my head, there was no way I could get it out.

Word to the wise: Take every company's complaint about how unskilled its workforce is with a grain of salt. Every boss wants workers who are highly skilled, motivated, obedient and willing to work for peanuts. When that doesn't happen, they blame it on someone else, usually the schools.

Today's NY Times has a story about high tech companies setting up in Ireland having trouble finding skilled workers, even though the unemployment rate is high. The story says they have to import workers from other countries to fill the positions.

Remember those recent international tests -- PISA -- where the U.S. ranked low, proving our workforce isn't educated enough for the 21st century? Well, Ireland scored 16 places above us, so they should have no problem finding skilled employees if it's all about how well students score on the tests. Apparently factors other than test scores are in play.

The article doesn't say what countries the imported workers come from, which leaves out an important part of the story. Either the reporter didn't do her job, or the companies complaining about a lack of skilled workers aren't saying where they went to find workers. Could many of them come from eastern Europe or other countries where the workers are used to low wages and poor working conditions? Could it be as much about what companies are willing to pay as the Irish workers' lack of skills?

AZ Republicans are well known for balancing the budget on the backs of children. Starting with a near-bottom education funding per child in the country, they cut 21% more over the past few years -- the highest cuts in the nation, naturally. Funding went back up a bit recently. Now it's only a 17% cut because the courts forced them to put back some of the money they were under legal obligation to include to account for inflation (and of course, they're fighting the ruling).

Now Rep John Kavanagh wants to protect children on the backs of children. He proposes taking 25% from First Things First which funds the Arizona Early Childhood Development and Health Board and give it to CPS to help it take care of its 6,000 case backlog and other problems. That comes to $45 million a year.

How nice of him to be generous with funds from a program Republicans love to hate. They tried to sweep funds from First Things First in 2009. The AZ Supreme Court nixed the move unanimously. Then they tried to repeal First Things First funding by ballot measure in 2010, only to have it voted down 70%-30%.

Here's an idea, Republicans. Stop starving the budget. Create some reasonable tax hikes on people and businesses that can afford it (taxpayers are shouldering a larger portion of taxes now, with businesses, including out-of-state corporations, paying less) and create a budget that gives our children what responsible adults are always supposed to give children: a helping hand.

Maybe CPS should consider taking funding for children away from the legislature and put it in more responsible hands.

I have to admit, I'm confused about the whole TUSD deseg thing, and Mari Herreras' cover story on the subject in the Weekly confused me still more, because it makes it clear just how complex the whole thing is and how important the next few years are in what we hope will be a movement toward greater desegregation and better education at TUSD.

Naturally, I'm all for the deseg effort -- "What do we want?" "Desegregation!" "When do we want it?" "Now!" -- and I support the main points of the court-ordered Unitary Plan the district has to follow. But should special master Willis Hawley be putting so much pressure on the district so soon after the plan has been ratified? Shouldn't he give the new guy and his newly constituted board a little breathing room?

I admit I have a soft spot for H.T. Sanchez and the two new board members, Cam Juarez and Kristel Foster. And I understand soft spots make you soft hearted which can make you soft headed. So maybe I'm giving them too much latitude by saying, "Take the school year and get an idea of what's going on before you make any big decisions. It's been 40 years. What's another year?"

Raena Janes, who founded the La Paloma Academy charter schools, has a Q&A in today's business section. Naturally, she sings the praises of her schools. What's her secret? The school emphasizes character. "We demand that our students are respectful and caring."

Sounds good, right? Why can't school districts do that? The answer is, they can try, but there's one thing they can't do. According to Janes,

"[W]e do expel quite a few kids a year that don’t want to be a part of that program."

Ah. If you can be selective -- charter schools can expel kids virtually at will with little or no cause -- you can end up with exactly the student body you want, unlike the come-one-come-all neighborhood schools. And where do you think the La Paloma undesirables end up? You guessed it. Back at their neighborhood school, of course, often in the middle of the year. If the child returns after one hundred days, the district school won't get any state money for the rest of the year. La Paloma keeps it all.

Julian Vasquez Heilig, an education prof at University of Texas at Austin, says, "School Choice means Schools Choose." That about says it. I'll give Janes some credit. Unlike the heads of BASIS and Great Hearts charters, she owns up to her selectivity.

The Douglas County School District near Denver broke campaign laws by paying a scholar to write a "scholarly" puff piece about the district just before the school board elections. The TUSD connection is, the Douglas district's superintendent is Elizabeth Celania-Fagen, who was TUSD supe before John Pedicone. What makes the connection less than trivial is, Fagen is one of the few public school superintendents in the nation to embrace vouchers, and the recent school board elections pitted her pro-voucher, anti-union candidates against a more progressive slate. (The progressives lost.) Meaning, we may have been lucky that Fagen chose to leave Tucson.

Also part of this story is, national conservative money poured into the elections on the pro-voucher, anti-union side. Both the Koch Brothers and Jeb Bush supported the "reform" candidates, with direct contributions to candidates and by funding independent campaigns. School board elections are being nationalized, mainly by big money conservatives, because the "school reform" movement is both pro-privatization, anti-government and anti-union, a three-fer for conservatives. Schools are a political battlefield, now more than ever.

While the conservative money flowing into a local school board election is perfectly legal, the district buying a "scholarly report" before the election isn't, according to a Denver judge. The report was written by Rick Hess, a somewhat respected conservative educational scholar working with the American Enterprise Institute, who should now lose whatever respectability he currently has. He got $30,000 to write about how wonderful and innovative the school district is.

Only four giving days until the end of the public school tax credits for the year. Please, if you pay state taxes, take advantage of the 100% back offer. Give $200 for an individual, $400 for a couple, to any public school or combination of schools -- charters count -- and you can subtract it from what you owe in 2013 state taxes. Won't cost you a penny.

If I may make a suggestion, give to a school that gets less money than others, which means a school with students from poor families who don't make enough to pay significant state taxes. TUSD lists the 26 schools in the district that receive the least per student, in order. Joan and I split our money between Hollinger Elementary, Grijalva Elementary and Catalina Magnet High (not to be confused with Catalina Foothills High). The first two are on the low money list. Hollinger has 96% of its students on free/reduced lunch, Grijalva 89% and Catalina High 76%. If you want to spend an enjoyable 6 minutes and fall in love with a bunch of kids, watch the youtube video about Hollinger's GATE Bilingual program. Grijalva Elementary looks like it has a good overall program with a bilingual strand at each grade level. And Catalina High is a virtual United Nations, with, if I remember correctly, over 40 languages spoken. All can use an extra infusion of cash for their very deserving kids.

If you want to read more, I wrote a column on the tax credits in the Explorer. But in a little more time than it would take you to read the column, you can go to the district website of your choice, click on the link (here's the one for TUSD), choose your school and enter your credit card information. Done! Instant boost for kids. BEFORE DECEMBER 31!!!

He-Knows-More-Than-I-Do UPDATE: Rex Scott, principal of Catalina Magnet High, gives more information about his school, a very worthy candidate for a school tax credit, in a comment.

Dave, many thanks to you and Joan for your generous contribution to the students at Catalina Magnet High School. We do indeed have over 40 languages and dialects represented on our campus, along with almost as many nations. Our school also has the highest mobility rate among any of the TUSD high schools, which speaks to the fact that many of our students are continually in search of affordable housing options. Over 10% of all the Youth On Their Own students in Pima County attend Catalina and many of those kids are part of our refugee and immigrant community. Folks who want to help the school and its families can also make donations to our on-campus food and clothing bank. We are blessed to have a terrific relationship with the local neighborhood association and several businesses in our area who support those endeavors, but contributions from other sources are always welcome.

Welcome to Ed Supe John Huppenthal's world, which he shares with other conservative Republican candidates across the country who aren't quite wingnut enough to satisfy the truly addled wingnuts. Hupp is being attacked by Diane Douglas, a primary challenger from the right. How will he respond? That'll depend on how seriously he takes her challenge.

To find out what's wrong-headed left-headed about our current Ed Supe, there's no better place to look than Seeing AZ Red. According to a post, Hupp's main sin is his embrace of the Common Core. The often gullible right hasn't been gulled by Hupp's changing the name to Arizona College and Career Ready Standards. They know it's still the Common Core.

It has also become difficult to sell the [Common Core's] leftist standards — long in multiculturalism, self esteem and social justice and short on actual education — to the groups he is addressing. “Unwavering“ in his commitment to Common Core, Huppenthal admits outside of the rebranding, nothing will actually change in his Obama-influenced vision for Arizona classrooms.

[snip]

FrontPage Mag exposes the shocking Common Core ‘Exemplars’ and the Daily Caller reveals graphic sex and the praising of Communist Castro.

My Tucson Weekly column takes apart the misleading conservative slogan, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation." The phrase sounds all progressive in a Brown v. Board of Education kind of way, but its purpose is to distract us from other pressing civil rights and economic rights issues. If education is the -- THE -- civil rights issue of our generation, that means all the other issues been solved, and that means we can cut social programs and services, and we can forget about income inequality. Just fix our failing schools, and everything else will take care of itself.

Here's what's interesting and telling about people who want us to believe education is the civil rights issue of our generation. They don't much care about civil rights. According to them, we've already realized Martin Luther King's dream, and it's time to replace "We shall overcome" with "We have overcome, so let's move on, shall we?"

Except for education, which is the one place they say the civil rights struggle continues. Why this one exception? Because blaming education for all of society's ills has so many benefits for conservatives.

The political right would love to take all our social and economic problems, wrap them up in a neat little bundle and dump them inside the schoolhouse door. No need to address problems like bias toward minorities. No need for remedies to the widening income gap and worsening economic stratification, which hit minorities so hard. Blame it all on the schools for not teaching those kids how to fit into society or giving them the skills they need to qualify for high-paying jobs. Fix the schools, and the problems will go away.

I'm feeling a bit hopeful that people are beginning to realize that education isn't the best way to get people out of poverty. Instead, poverty is the major reason too many children in this country are ill equipped to focus on their educations.

The most fascinating political development of 2013 to observe was the rise of the progressive "Moral Mondays" movement in North Carolina in response to the radicalized extremist Tea-Publican controlled state legislature.

"Moral Mondays" engages in civil disobedience protests, organized in part by local religious leaders including William Barber, head of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP. Members of the protest movement meet every Monday to protest an action by the North Carolina legislature and then enter the legislature building. Once they enter, a number are peacefully arrested each Monday.

The Moral Monday protests that rocked North Carolina (and led to hundreds of arrests each Monday) last year may be coming to Georgia.

A group called Moral Monday Georgia (moralmondayga.org) has quietly begun gathering supporters and planning organizing meetings this month. They plan one of the first actions on the Jan. 13, the first Monday of the session, and the platform focuses on a call to expand Medicaid, restore funding to public schools and raising the minimum wage.

The Moral Monday movement to protest changes in North Carolina public policy that organizers believe are extreme and hurt the state won’t abate in 2014 and will spread to other states, its leader said.

Activists from a dozen states attended a meeting in Raleigh earlier this month to learn how to hold similar protests in their states.

On this month's episode of the cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, I have a segment showing how closely, almost exactly, state school grades correlate with the household incomes in areas around Tucson. I posted about this earlier, but the video allowed me to enhance the graphics to make the point clearer. And I added a second map which was created by Barbara Tellman that uses census data to show how Tucson breaks down by average household income. You can see both maps below the fold.

The video busts the conservative myth that great teachers and great schools create high test scores, and family income is only a secondary consideration. As Bill Clinton's campaign pointed out, "It's the economy [and income inequality], stupid."

Yeah, I know, Indiana is a long way from Tucson, but the conservative "education reform" juggernaut, like "Money" in Oliver Stone's Wall Street, "never sleeps," so any news that contradicts its constant myth making is worth reporting on.

To be sure, there are charter schools and private schools with strong growth scores. In fact the scores are all over the map for charter schools, private schools and public schools. And among public schools, there’s no clear pattern to which schools do well and which don’t. . . . But the overall trend is clear: Schools that are part of public school districts do better.

If you've read my posts over the years, you know I don't like the national Imagine Schools chain, which has a dozen-plus schools in Arizona. The founder is a multi-millionaire who made his money on an Enron-like energy scheme, and he thinks growth is more important than quality. The four Indiana Imagine schools earned two Ds and two Fs from the state. One of the D scores is actually an improvement, since the school had an F in 2012.

Interesting stat. On the list of the top 100 universities receiving U.S. utility patents in 2012, U.S. universities hold 15 of the top 20 spots. I'm ignorant enough not to know how much of a big deal this is. After all, it's universities all over the world filing for U.S. patents. But if people all over the world make sure to get U.S. patents for what they create, it means something. With that caveat . . .

The top four are the University of California, MIT, Stanford and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. Next is Tsinghua University, followed by University of Texas and California Institute of Technology, and so on down the line, a number of U.S. universities followed by one or two from the rest of the world.

Again, not to push this too hard because of my admitted ignorance, but if our K-12 schools are so lousy, how do our universities get the intellectual power to come up with all those patents? Is it the foreign students who attend? If that's true, why the hell would they come to our universities if all the great students are back home?

Leaving my ignorance behind, here's what I know. True, our students don't score at the top of international tests. The reasons are many, but that's a fact. However, when it comes to invention -- that is, creative thinking, intellectual risk taking, entrepreneurship -- our students do very well. That's why the minister of education in Singapore, one of the reliably high scoring nations on international tests, said,

"[The U.S. has] a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well--like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."

That's why educators from Asian nations visit U.S. schools, trying to figure out how we foster what the Singapore minister calls "creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition." Maybe, just maybe, that's why so much ground-breaking innovation happens in the U.S. Maybe, just maybe, that's why the brightest young tech people in the world gravitate to Silicon Valley rather than our top graduates going to . . . what's the international equivalent of Silicon Valley, anyway?

The current unrest in Turkey isn't big news in Tucson. Corruption in Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's government doesn't merit front page, or even inside page news here. But there's a connection. Erdogan has close ties to a Turkish Sufi preacher living in Pennsylvania, Fethullah Gulen. And Gulen is the glue holding together a number of charter schools across the country including the Sonoran Science Academies here in Tucson, which has a number of campuses including one on the Davis-Monthan Air Force base.

There's nothing new about the news that Sonoran Schools are loosely affiliated with what is known as the Gulen movement in the U.S., or that Sonoran Science charters are affiliated with similar charters across the country. I've written about it. The Star's Tim Steller has written about it. It's been on 60 Minutes and other news programs. But with Turkey, Erdogan and Gulen back in the news, it's worth mentioning.

I'd like H.T. Sanchez and the newly constituted TUSD board to be given time to change University High's admittance process in their own way before Special Master Willis Hawley tells them what to do. But I'm not sure TUSD should fight this battle to the bitter end. Both changes to UHS's admissions process are reasonable ways to increase minority enrollment at UHS, which is the goal. There's no telling which would be more effective. TUSD taking the issue to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals is an overreach, and the district's stubbornness on the issue could make later battles with Hawley harder, not easier.

TUSD wants to add a motivation test to the current UHS admissions process. It's a reasonable idea. Students who just miss the cut on the GPA and entrance exam requirements but are determined to succeed have a good chance of doing well at UHS. Even if their achievement is a bit lower than other students, if they pass fewer AP exams or end up with lower GPAs, they likely will have received a more rigorous education and be more ready for college than if they had attended another district school, which is the point of attending the school.

Hawley wants to add items you normally see on college entrance exams -- student essays, teacher recommendations, participation in activities, and so on. That's a reasonable idea too. If those things are good enough to get students into college, they'll likely be good indicators of potential success at UHS.

Let's start this pitch with an offer you shouldn't refuse. You can, and should, give $200 -- $400 for a couple -- to a public school of your choice (it can be a district or charter school) through the state's tax credit program. Give the money before December 31 and get all of it back when you pay taxes. All of it. Every cent. If you owe at least $200 to $400 in Arizona income tax, the amount you give will be subtracted from what you owe. To put it another way, you'll give much needed money to a public school, and it won't cost you a dime.

Now let's add some detail to the pitch. As the AZ Republic points out, schools in high rent districts get a whole lot of tax credit money while schools serving the children of families living in poverty get far less (Catalina Foothills School District, by the way, tops the state in tax credit revenue). The reason is obvious. Many people in lower income areas don't owe enough in taxes to take advantage of the credit, and even those who barely qualify don't have the extra cash on hand to give away hundreds of dollars now even if they know they'll get it back later.

So your task is to try and even things out a bit. Give your money to a school that traditionally gets fewer dollars per student. How do you know which schools fit the description? Well, TUSD makes it easy. As one of its inviting and informative tax credit web pages, TUSD has a page with a list of the 26 district schools that get the least per student last year.

These schools received an average contribution ranging from $8.65 to $23.37 per student. The average contribution among all TUSD schools is $54.81 per student.

To make things even clearer, the schools at the top of the list received the least.

I've been researching the phrase, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation" for a column I'm writing for the Tucson Weekly. I traced the concept back to the early days of the school voucher movement in the 1950s, followed it as it was used to embrace charter schools and vouchers in the 1990s and watched it become a buzz-term for the whole conservative "education/privatization/corporate reform" movement in the past few decades. Today it's a regular part of conservative phraseology. It has been used frequently by at least one (former) president and is, regrettably, on the lips of our current U.S. Secretary of Education.

The people and groups promoting this seemingly pro-civil rights phrase are often ambivalent about civil rights legislation and downright hostile to government programs that help minorities and the poor. The purpose of the phrase is to focus the civil rights struggle inside the school and remove it from the rest of society. "We've solved all the other civil rights problems," the phrase implies. All that's left to do is to push "school choice," meaning vouchers and charter schools, and we will have achieved Martin Luther King's dream of a just and equal society.

The most important word in the phrase, "Education is the civil rights issue of our generation," is the tiny word, "the." That one word transforms the phrase from a reasonable statement -- that education is part of the larger push for greater civil rights -- into a pronouncement that education is the one and only civil rights issue left to be addressed. Watch what happens when the word "the" is replaced by "one of the": "Education is one of the civil rights issues of our generation." The meaning changes significantly. The revised phrase maintains that education is one of a list of civil rights issues needing to be addressed in the country, a list that can include blatant and subtle racial/ethnic discrimination, LGBT rights, immigration reform issues, inequitable salaries for women and voter suppression. But if education is "the civil rights issue of our generation," we can ignore all the others. That's why the phrase is such an effective conservative weapon; it informs us that all our civil rights problems have been taken care of -- except, of course, for education -- and we don't need any more of that meddlesome, unnecessary, expensive government intrusion.

People don't like vouchers. Voucher initiatives have been voted down every time they've been presented to voters. Arizona's two voucher programs, Tuition Tax Credits and Education Savings Accounts, were passed by our conservative state legislature, and that's true in other states as well.

Big money conservatives like vouchers, so they keep pumping more money into the idea. Here's the latest. The Walton Family Foundation -- the WalMart fortune -- is putting $6 million into the Alliance for School Choice, a pro-voucher lobbying group working in Arizona and a bunch of other states, doubling the group's budget. For the Waltons, $6 million barely counts as lunch money. Their foundation is one of the financial pillars of the conservative "education reform" movement, and many, many millions more go into supporting charter schools as well as efforts to promote vouchers.

Let's connect a few dots. The head of Alliance for School Choice is headed by Betsy DeVos of the Amway fortune. She also founded the American Federation for Children (AFC), a conservative pro-charter/voucher/privatization organization. The AFC is joined at the hip to Democrats for Education Reform (DFER), a PAC that works to elect Dems in Democratic-heavy districts who support the privatization agenda, including vouchers. DFER opened a branch in Arizona this spring and along with the AFC has thrown its support behind three Democratic legislators: Sen. Barbara McGuire (LD-8), Rep. Mark Cardenas (LD-19) and the recently appointed Sen. Carlyle Begay (LD-7).

It's been more than two years since a tsunami caused six reactor meltdowns and massive radiation leakage at the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster, and the place is still being held together with chewing gum and bailing wire. The reactors are in critical condition, one mishap or geological event away from a second disaster that could be worse than the first.

Surprisingly, no one is spending much time blaming the problems at Fukushima on the undereducated Japanese who weren't able to avert the disaster or fix the problems once they occurred, and we don't hear much about Japan's government being inept. Because, well, we're talking about Japan, not the U.S. Everyone knows Japan's schools are wonderful. In the recent international tests, they scored 4th in Reading, 4th in Science and 7th in Math, unlike the failing schools in the U.S. that came in around 20th place overall. And, well, those Asian countries know how to get things done, unlike our inept, debt-riddled, bureaucracy-laden, Kenyan/socialist-run U.S. government.

But for a moment, let's play the blame game, like it might be played by conservatives if this were a U.S. problem, complete with bold, underlined, all-caps pronouncements.

An article in today's NY Times, via the Texas Tribune, discusses the way charter schools, which are funded with taxpayer dollars, hide much of their financial information from the public. The poster child: BASIS, which recently opened a San Antonio branch. BASIS's Texas application is online, but much of the application is blacked out because the charter schools are run by Basis.ed, a private, for profit corporation, and, according to the application, much of the material is "Confidential/Proprietary Information and/or Confidential/Financial Information."

It's an important story about how nonprofit charter schools like BASIS funnel most of their taxpayer dollars to for-profit Education Management Organizations (EMOs), also referred to as Charter Management Organizations (CMOs), where it is hidden from public scrutiny. The publicly traded corporation, K12 Inc., which runs virtual schools including Arizona Virtual Academy, is another prime example, and there are many more.

The story of the redacted BASIS application in Texas started right here. It was first reported by Ann-Eve Pedersen on the monthly cable access show she and I do, Education: The Rest of the Story. In her segment debunking the conservative myth that the business model will improve education, she displayed the BASIS application, which looks like an FBI file where entire pages are blacked out. I used her information to write the post, BASIS Charters' educational trade secrets. Some people in Texas who are concerned about the proliferation of Arizona charters like BASIS and Great Hearts in their state saw the post and the video, relayed the information to Morgan Smith, a Texas Trib reporter, and she used it as part of her article.

Positive comments about TUSD's new Supe H.T. Sanchez have been coming from nearly all corners. It's been amazing to hear such uniformly upbeat appraisals for any part of TUSD, which tends to be Bad Rap Central in the Star and among detractors on the right and the left. Now we hear another encouraging voice: Board member Mark Stegeman.

Stegeman has made reasonably positive comments about Sanchez from the time he was voted in as the new superintendent, even though Stegeman was the only No vote. But in his latest constituent newsletter, Stegeman goes farther in praising Sanchez.

What TUSD does need and has sorely lacked -- for far too long --is careful decisions and strong management execution, week in and week out. . . . From what I have seen, the quality of decisions has improved significantly since Dr. Sanchez arrived. This may be partly because Dr. Sanchez, who had a thin track record for managing a district as complex as TUSD, at least had more prior experience running a large organization than did other recent superintendents. Not only management execution but also the flow of creative ideas have improved since his arrival. If this trend continues, then the long run benefits will be enormous.

Dr. Randall Friese, a surgeon at the UAMC Trauma Center and one of the doctors who treated victims of the January 8, 2011, shooting at Gabby Giffords' Congress on Your Corner event, has officially announced as a Democratic candidate for the AZ House in LD-9, which is one of Arizona's few split LDs, with Democratic Sen. Steve Farley and Rep. Victoria Steele holding two seats and Republican Rep. Ethan Orr holding the third.

I haven't had a chance to hear Friese speak or to talk with him personally, but he's got a terrific looking bio. Friese served four years in the navy as a surgeon and is currently associate medical director for the UAMC Trauma Center and associate professor of surgery. He's got a clever slogan, "Let's Put a Doctor in the House!" More important to me, he's putting education front and center in his campaign.

“Education is the great equalizer,” Friese said. “It levels the playing field, and it opens many closed doors.”

More when I know details of his stands on education issues.

I live in LD-9, and Orr has a "not too bad for a Republican" rep among Democrats here. That translates to someone who supports Brewer's agenda rather than being a card carrying member of the completely wacked-out right. When Brewer starts looking like a moderate voice of reason to Democrats, that's an indication of how wingnut the rest of the party has become (Orr may have a primary challenger from the right because of his Brewer-friendly votes). If Friese turns out to be the real deal, "Great to have a Democrat" will certainly trump "not too bad for a Republican."

The concern over the average U.S. scores on the latest international PISA test has been far more muted this time out than usual. I'm hopeful that the viewpoints of progressive educators have finally made their way inside the mainstream vision of education, which has been dominated by the "failing schools" story coming from the conservative "education reform" movement. The fact is, a more nuanced look at this most recent set of scores as well as U.S. scores on other international exams indicates that our schools are not failing. True, they can and should do better. But failing? Far from it.

For a moment, though, let's assume our scores on the PISA test mean we're falling behind the rest of the world educationally. Instead of allowing the corporate reform/school choice/vouchers/testing crowd to interpret the reasons for our possibly poor showing, let's look at some other ways of viewing our performance.

• Our PISA scores have remained stagnant throughout the No Child Left Behind decade. The Bush era's testing and shaming has done nothing to improve our international scores.

• If you just look at U.S. schools with less than 10% of their children on free or reduced lunch, our scores would be number one in the world in science and reading and number five in mathematics. The large number of U.S. students living in poverty brings our average scores way down.

Talking Points Memo's regular Book Club feature has a piece by Diane Ravitch: Stop Doing The Wrong Things In Education. It's a short adaptation of the basic concepts in her new book, Reign of Error. She begins by discussing the conservative "education reform" narrative which has been taken up by most of the media -- our schools are failing, so we need more choice (charters and vouchers) and a stronger standards/testing regimen. But, according to Ravitch,

There is only one problem with this narrative.

It is wrong.

Public education is not broken. It is not failing or declining. The diagnosis is wrong, and the solutions of the corporate reformers are wrong. Our urban schools are in trouble because of concentrated poverty and racial segregation. But public education as such is not “broken.”

On the cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story, I discussed Ravitch's interesting biography -- from moderately progressive educator to advocate for the "education reform" agenda to strongly progressive educator -- and some of the ideas outlined in her book. It's a reasonably good summary of Ravitch and her ideas.

"The biggest criticism is that China's education has sacrificed everything else for test scores, such as life skills, character building, mental health, and physical health."

It wasn't some anti-test radical educator in the U.S. The speaker was Xiong Bingqi, a Shanghai-based scholar on education. Shanghai's students got the highest scores in the world on the recent international PISA test. Xiong also said,

"This should not be considered a pride for us, because overall it still measures one's test-taking ability. You can have the best answer for a theoretical model, but can you build a factory on a test paper?"

Who said Asian countries are "examination hell" countries, where the push to teach to the test "is becoming worse and worse"? That was Koji Kato, a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo's Sophia University. Here's the quote:

"Asian countries do better than European and American schools because we are 'examination hell' countries," said Koji Kato, a professor emeritus of education at Tokyo's Sophia University. "There is more pressure to teach to the test. In my experience in working with teachers the situation is becoming worse and worse."

Ironically, the U.S. has joined the race to become an "examination hell" country while many Asian nations are trying to scale back on their test-driven curricula. In some affluent families in Asia, fathers remain at home to support their wives and children who have moved to the U.S. and Australia to escape the educational pressure cooker and get a more well rounded school experience.

This isn't to minimize the defiencies in U.S. education -- though many of them can be traced to our deplorable lack of health, economic and social services for people living in poverty. It's to say the solution isn't more teaching to high stakes tests. That may raise our international scores, though the truth is, our PISA scores have remained flat during the decade our schools have been teaching to NCLB tests. But there is no indication a standardized-test-based school culture will help create more innovative entrepreneurs or skilled workers, nor will it make our children better citizens.

On Friday, Ann-Eve Pedersen and I recorded a story about the latest charter school funding controversy for our cable TV show, Education: The Rest of the Story. It hasn't aired yet, but in the meanwhile, Tim Steller has done a first rate job of covering similar material. He's got most of the information -- and got it right -- in his Sunday column, More money for charter schools should mean higher expectations.

Steller isn't a charter school basher. He has kids in a charter, a choice I respect. When parents find schools they believe are best suited for their children, that's where they should send their children. But Steller is clear-eyed about the funding issue, offering a lucid discussion of most of the important issues.

I've tried my damndest to understand the issue of equitable funding of charters and school district schools, and I've never come up with a go-to-the-bank answer. For me, the best question to ask if you want to make an apples-to-apples comparison is, how much money goes to educate the child without special needs sitting in a classroom? If the figures are similar for charters and district schools, then the system is reasonably equitable.

Interestingly, the best answer I've received is from Chris Ackerley, a physics teacher at Amphi High and a Republican who ran for state legislature. Chris and I disagree on lots of issues, but he's a smart guy who's better with numbers than I am, and he took an objective look at school funding. His takeaway was, when looking at the money that goes for students' educations -- the money that goes to that median student sitting in a classroom -- some schools get a bit more, some a bit less, but it doesn't break down into a charter/district school dichotomy. On the whole, they receive similar funding.

This falls into the "Be careful what you wish for" category. I mainly applauded the Unitary Status Plan put together for TUSD by the courts. It clarified and updated the desegregation plan the district has been under for decades. And it was necessary to appoint a Special Master to oversee implementation of the plan. But Special Master Willis Hawley is getting a little hyperactive about his duties. He needs to take a breath and see if TUSD can work things out before he jumps in with both feet. We've got a new Supe in town and a reconstituted board. They're on the side of deseg. These things take time.

First Hawley wanted TUSD to scrap part of its magnet program because the magnet schools aren't sufficiently integrated. H.T. Sanchez wants some time to let the district finish its efficiency audit and demographic study, then look at holistic changes to the district. Makes sense to me.

Now Hawley is telling TUSD to scrap its new admissions plans for University High School (UHS) because he doesn't think they represent the best way to bring UHS closer to the district's racial balance. The district plans to add a motivation test to allow students who don't quite make the GPA/entrance exam cut to be accepted into the school. Hawley wants something that looks more like college application material -- student essays, staff recommendations, etc. His isn't a bad idea. In fact, TUSD is looking at adding the those items for the 2014-15 school year. But once again, the district wants the chance to make a good faith effort to work things out on its own.

Scores from the PISA international tests came out Tuesday. If you just look at the raw scores, the takeaway is, U.S. students are far behind the rest of the world. It's a hopeful sign that many people in the media, possibly for the first time, are taking a more measured approach to the data and considering factors that add a degree of depth to their analysis and make a blanket condemnation of U.S. schools look questionable. But not Power Lunch on CNBC. Uh uh. Host Sue Herera interviewed the top two people at BASIS charter schools -- Craig Barrett, president and chairman of the board (and Gov. Brewer's educational right hand man), and Michael Block, BASIS' founder -- and asked them flat out, no nuance, why U.S. students are lagging so far behind internationally. Barrett, an intelligent man who has lots of experience in the educational field (though he's never taught at a K-12 school), answered, disingenuously,

"It's probably a combination of three things. Great education systems like Shanghai -- or BASIS -- have great teachers, high expectations and a degree of accountability, or tension, in the system. . . . You hardly find that at all in the United States."

I guess Barrett forgot to mention the fourth thing: both Shanghai and BASIS have highly selective school populations. BASIS uses a triple selection process to make sure its high school students are among the most intelligent and conscientious in the state. Shanghai is a city filled with China's elite. While 24% of China's high school graduates go on to college, the number is 84% in Shanghai. On average, Shanghai's parents spend as much on tutoring and weekend activities for their high school aged children as the average Chinese worker makes in a year. Oh, and children of immigrants aren't allowed to attend Shanghai's high schools. If they want to go to school, they have to return to the rural villages they came from.

I'll be doing my regular Blogger Beat discussion with Bill Buckmaster on his radio show today. We'll be talking about TUSD, other education issues (maybe the PISA international exam whose results came out yesterday [Spoiler alert: don't get too upset over the U.S. scores]) and whatever else comes up.

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